IT Industry Fails to Keep Pace

A CIO Insight analysis of government data reveals that payrolls among the nation's producers of computer hardware, software and services didn't keep up with overall job growth over the past five years.

Employment growth among America's IT producers—the companies that manufacture computer hardware, create software and provide a wide-range of information services—failed to keep pace with payrolls from all nonfarm industries over the past five years, according to a CIO Insight analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

While overall nonfarm payrolls advanced by nearly 5.8 percent between May 2002 and last month, employment among the amalgamation of IT sectors grew a mere 2.3 percent to 2.2 million jobs.

But not all computer sectors are createdor created jobsequally. Sectors furnishing customer computer programming and systems design services did the best, combining to add more than 180,000 jobs. But computer and peripheral manufacturers shed nearly 55,000 jobs during that same period.

Take a look at this slide show to see where the job growth is—and where it's not—within the broad IT industry.